The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Sidescrolling Action, Hack and Slash & Run and Gun
Sidescrolling action games were a staple of 1980s arcade games and console games, featuring humanoid characters and ground-based progression.
As arcade games grew more sophisticated in the early 1980s, developers began moving away from the abstract and fanciful games necessitated by black backdrops and simplistic graphics and instead began experimenting with themes from popular culture like secret agent missions, ninja clan showdowns, black ops commando infiltrations and muscle-men with giant guns blasting hordes of evil aliens. While some of these games bled over into the overhead action category, many others utilized a fusion of mechanics lifted from shoot ‘em ups and platform games. The result was an exciting new subgenre eventually dubbed the “run and gun,” and its most stunning early example, Konami’s 1987 arcade game Contra, grew incredibly popular because of its excellent 2-player cooperative port for the NES (as well as its inclusion of the “Konami Code” to make the game a bit easier on newcomers).
Sidescrolling action games have a few distinctive characteristics that set them apart from action platformers and action-adventure titles:
A playfield that scrolls (either horizontally or vertically or both) from a sideways, cross-sectional perspective
An emphasis on action, usually in the style of a shoot ‘em up or hack and slash game
Human-like characters as opposed to vehicles, spaceships or flying creatures
Linear storytelling and on-rails movement through a game world with little emphasis on exploration or storyline.
While early sidescrolling action games essentially felt like mash-ups of platformers with other genres like shoot ‘em ups, several subgenres began to form by the mid to late 1980s as the genre evolved:
Run and gun games where you solve all of your problems by shooting everything in sight. Some involve light platform jumping or the ability to take to the air with a jump, jetpack or vehicle, but others are pure on-the-ground action. Contra is a wonderful example of this style of play, as is Rolling Thunder. Sega’s Shinobi is a subtler example, replacing your bullets with kunai daggers and shurikens.
Hack and slash games where you solve all of your problems by hitting everything in you encounter with a melee weapon. Most involve some platforming as well, and the wonderful subgenre example Strider even adds in the element of climbing on the side or underside of any platform you can grab. Capcom’s Trojan and Taito’s Rastan are both great examples as well since each focuses primarily on melee combat.
Multilane shooter games where you hop between different levels of equidistant heights onscreen, often shooting backwards or forwards as you do so. Since these games often auto-scroll, part of the danger is in getting trapped behind hazards or waves of enemies. Son Son and Psycho Soldier are two examples of this style of game.
Scrolling action games had actually been around for years before Contra broke the mold, and one of the most distinctive featuring a side view of the characters was Taito’s Elevator Action, a 1983 title where a secret agent codenamed “Otto” infiltrated a building by ziplining into the top floor and then descending floor by floor, having shootouts with enemy agents and retrieving secret documents from special rooms. While Otto could shoot enemies, he could also dodge bullets, shoot out lights, crush enemies with elevators or even leap over elevators shafts. The range of motion and the emphasis on utilizing multiple actions to get through each stage provided a unique experience that felt quite different from the platform games of the day. Unlike most scrolling action games that would come after it, Elevator Action’s playfield scrolled vertically rather than horizontally, and it remained a distinctive and popular arcade action game throughout the decade.
As Irem’s Kung-Fu Master established the beat ‘em up subgenre, Technos’s Karate Champ established the competitive fighting game and Namco’s Pac-Land created a template for the scrolling action platformer, Capcom’s 1984 arcade game SonSon introduced a rudimentary run and gun sidescrolling experience. SonSon was unlike most of the games that would come after it, using a multilane setup with six different floors that allowed players to move between lanes and blast enemies coming from the sides of the screen as well as collect items and avoid hazards. As Son Son or Ton Ton, the player could only shoot left or right and had limited range, forcing players to change lanes to avoid waves enemies when it wasn’t possible to shoot them all. Despite looking like a platform game, SonSon’s focus was on relentless shoot ‘em up-style action thanks to its forced scrolling and aggressive enemies. The game would also sometimes stop at a fortress and force the player to destroy a stack of glowing skull doors while facing heavy waves of enemies before progressing forward.
Another interesting arcade game from 1984 was Jaleco’s Formation Z (also known as Aerboto), a Japan-only sidescrolling action hybrid that allowed players to shift from being a robot on the ground to a plane flying around in the air. While Formation Z is mostly forgotten today, its ground combat sequences utilize many of the hallmarks of run and gun games that would follow, such as a gun that can be fired in multiple directions, a chargeable blast and instant deaths from stray enemy bullets.
Nichibutsu introduced two 1985 sidescrolling shooters that took the category even further. In Cop 01, players strapped on a jetpack and ran through scrolling stages where it was necessary to blast all sorts of enemies and even fly over them to reach the next stage. But Cosmo Police - Galivan upped the ante further by adding in platformer mechanics and stages that scrolled both horizontally and vertically in different places. While both games are obscure today, they came closer to the heights Konami would find with Contra two years later than Konami’s 1985 arcade game Rush’n Attack (also known as Green Beret), a military action sidescroller where a commando armed only with a survival knife infiltrated an enemy compound to make his way towards a P.O.W. camp and free the prisoners. Rush’n Attack was interesting in that it played somewhat like a multilane shooter by offering players different horizontal levels they could access in some areas of the map, but also would force the action back to the ground for boss encounters. The game was also peculiar in that weapons were very scarce and most enemies had to be dispatched with a knife attack rather than guns or grenades. The game was a hit, but when Konami attempted to make a sequel with the same mechanics in 1989 with M.I.A.: Missing In Action, the same formula felt horribly outdated.
The same cannot be said for Namco’s 1986 espionage action game Rolling Thunder, a stylish action game where players could jump from lower areas to higher areas by pushing up and jump together. While the gunplay and frequent doors you could enter resembled Elevator Action in many ways, the horizontal scrolling stages, duck and cover mechanics and over-the-top spy movie theming (complete with colorful hooded henchmen) helped Rolling Thunder to deliver a distinctive action experience that even included an unfolding story between stages. Rolling Thunder was good enough to receive an excellent arcade sequel in 1991 as well as a Genesis-only continuation in 1993, with each merely building upon the distinctive style and gameplay that made the first game so great.
Data East opted to try a different movie trope in 1986 and released Express Raider, a Wild West train robbery game where players got to be an an outlaw trying to rob a series of trains. Half of the game utilized beat ‘em up mechanics similar to Kung-Fu Master, but the other half had the player ride on a horse and participate in a shooting gallery sequence where they blasted enemies in each car of the train. The fusion of the two styles made for a game that didn’t fit neatly into any category, but which felt quite similar to Rush’n Attack in execution.
Meanwhile, Sega took things in a more futuristic direction with 1986’s Quartet, a four-player sidescrolling shooting game where players worked together as a team to locate a boss in stages that could scroll both left and right and retrieve a key so they could advance to the next stage. Much like Cop 01, players could obtain jetpacks and fly around the stages, but getting hit by an enemy knocked them to the ground where they were forced to run and jump around platformer-like stages similar to Cosmo Police – Galivan.
1987 saw the release of two monumental sidescrolling action titles: Konami’s Contra, which would go on to become the template for sidescrolling run and gun gaming, and Sega’s Shinobi, a ninja-themed take on Rolling Thunder. Both games benefitted from excellent home ports - while Contra shone on the NES, Shinobi was definitely far superior on the Sega Master System. Both games also introduced three-dimensional shooting gallery segments to break up the action. But the two couldn’t have been more different in how they actually played – Contra was a bombastic co-op shooter where players could blast foes in multiple directions while Shinobi was about precision and careful decision-making, often encouraging players to utilize the terrain to their advantage and to avoid enemies when possible.
As arcade game developers began to build bigger and better games on more capable 16/32-bit hardware, the scrolling action genre started to hit its stride. Data East’s RoboCop, Irem’s Ninja Spirit, Konami’s Super Contra, Capcom’s Forgotten Worlds and Taito’s Nastar Warrior (also known as Rastan Saga II) all debuted in 1988, while Williams Electronics’s N.A.R.C., Capcom’s Strider and Sega’s Shadow Dancer (a follow-up to Shinobi) all hit arcades in 1989. Many of these games enjoyed excellent home PC and console ports and are still fondly remembered today as accessible and entertaining experiences.
On consoles, however, it was difficult to find good sidescrolling action games that weren’t ported directly from the arcades or Japanese PC platforms; console developers tended to favor creating family-friendly platformers or meatier, moodier action adventure games. On the NES, a few lesser-known games like Taito’s Demon Sword, Hudson Soft’s Robowarrior and Aicom Corporation’s Amagon offered some console-specific action, but it was not until the 1990s that home consoles became major contributors to this category.
Arcade game developers, in the meantime, only stuck with the category for a few more years into the 1990s before mostly integrating the mechanics into other, more popular genres like shoot ‘em ups, beat ‘em ups and brawlers. As fighting games started to dominate and 3D gaming began giving game developers the ability to build more heavily upon shooting gallery mechanics, sidescrolling action games became something of an anachronism. And on PCs and consoles, first-person shooters and 3D action titles became all the rage while anything that required pixelated sprites was increasingly regarded as outdated.
After some shining moments in the 1990s like Alien Soldier, Gunstar Heroes, Shock Troopers, Rapid Reload, Strider 2 and the Metal Slug Series, sidescrolling action titles largely evaporated and were mostly confined to handhelds and mobile platforms in the 2000s and relegated to indie games or retro revivals in the 2010s. Fortunately, popular modern games like Cuphead, Katana Zero and Blazing Chrome have helped to revive and update the category with fresh ideas and novel presentation and mechanics.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
The original Shinobi is still a fun pick-up-and-play game for me, even if I very rarely make it past level two hahaha
Super keen to see the series coming back!
Metal Slug was a masterpiece.